This app turns your phone into a dashcam and gives you collision warnings

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There are few things worse than being involved in a collision. Not only does it carry the serious risk of bodily harm, the distress we feel when our cars are mutilated is a feeling hard to overcome.

The added hassles of paperwork, insurance, and repair workshops are other pestering headaches we’d much rather avoid.

This problem might be mitigated to a large degree with the inevitable autonomous car revolution, but that’s a fair distance away. In the meantime, your phone can help you drive safely.

Nexar is a dashcam app that uses your phone’s accelerometer and camera to track traffic conditions as you drive. It’ll send you warnings and emergency signals in case of any impending danger – such as sudden braking or a crash on the road ahead. No matter how old your car is, this app can turn it into a much smarter beast.

The Israel-headquartered startup, founded by Eran Shir and Bruno Ruiz, raised a total of US$14.5 million in funding so far, including a sizeable US$10.5 million series A round in June.

The app is free to download and doesn’t rely solely on expensive hardware to function properly, explains Aviv Cohen, VP of marketing. It’s capable of automatically detecting and recording events like a hard brake or collisions. Once the video is saved, it’ll be automatically uploaded to the cloud.

In November, Nexar launched its vehicle-to-vehicle network so that users would now be part of a real-time, global sensor network. In a blog post, Eran outlined a major goal of the company – to create a “new normal” in three years wherein “collisions are not an act of God, but rather, a handled problem”.

Monetizing data

Of course, as this app is downloaded by drivers around the world, they’ll be relaying back an incredible amount of data to Nexar’s servers. The team admits that’s how they’ll eventually make money.

“The data products and services derived are on the market for vested parties,” says Aviv. “Fleets and insurance companies have an interest in keeping drivers safe and in the case of insurance companies, building a better model for their premiums.”

“Cities will be interested in using our data for urban planning, monitoring road conditions, and the like, in order to maintain infrastructure and regulate traffic flows. Automakers and developers of autonomous vehicles need access to the exact type of data and vehicle-to-vehicle network that Nexar has in order to make a competitive, safe product, so our services are proving to be invaluable to them,” he adds.

Effectively the app leverages a model that’s very similar to Waze – which monitored estimated driving times and was acquired by Google for US$1 billion.

Aviv says the team’s working on adding further products to the existing suite. Next up is an app built specifically for logistics and fleet managers. He doesn’t give away many details about what features it might have, just saying it’ll “offer transparency and data analysis.”